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Okay, I received my NN3 MKII the other day (that was a fast delivery and very nice stuff ‚Äì thx) and have made one 360 panorama with my Canon EOS 30D and a Canon EF-S 10-22 mm. lens at 10 mm, no problems what so ever (made 6 pictures and used Abode Ligthroom v 2.0 and exported directly to the automated panorama function in PS CS3 - this is great).

So the next step will be a 360x180 panorama. I scanned the tutorials on the net and found that I will need to take 2 series of 6 pictures with this camera and lens setup, one on -30 degrees, and one on +30 degrees, is this correct. How do I stitch the pictures together, will the best approach be to make two horizontal 360 panoramas, and the stitch these into the finished 360+180, advise will be appreciated - (Cant find any tutorials dealing with stitching two horizontal series together) thx.

You need to use a stitching program that is capable of handling spherical panoramas, such as: PTGui, Autopano Pro, and Hugin. All the images are stitched together at once. These programs have no concept of rows and columns - they just handle images taken at various angles of yaw (horizontal), pitch(vertical), and roll(twist). Autopano Pro is an automatic stitcher, with an emphasis on ease of use. PTGui basically offers full manual control of the entire stitching process but with provision for semi-automatic operation via automated features and a wizard in the shape of the Project Assistant. Free trial versions of both stitchers are available. Hugin is a free product with much of the capability of PTGui, but is rather less easy to use and not quite as stable. You can find a PTGui tutorial for beginners at http://www.johnhpanos.com/ptgtut.htm.

Peter, A manual stitch isn&#039;t difficult but it can occasionally be laborious, which is not the same thing. Why not download PTGui and just try a stitch using the automatic process offered on the initial Project Assistant screen. It&#039;s reasonablly self explanatory and just might work quite well. OTOH, it might fail for the same reasons that Autopano Pro failed. Possibly there were problems caused by a failure to find matching features in rather bland areas in some images (not uncommon with expanses of blue skies). Anyway, there&#039;s no harm in doing a quick run.

I did try PTGui, and as expected the project assistant failed. I was able to do a fairly descent spherical panorama though, by applying data by hand and adding markers manually. Its seems that there may not be enough overlap between the two horizontal series, and I found that I needed to do one series on +45 degrees, and one on -45 degrees to make a spherical panorama, so perhaps I need to do more than 2 by 8 photos with my present setup to get the project assistant to work – anyway I may have to go for the SIGMA 8 mm. lens anyway.

perhaps I need to do more than 2 by 8 photos with my present setup to get the project assistant to work

Peter, Your two rows at +/-30 should be ok generally, with a zenith and a nadir shot to complete the 360x180 view. There is, however, a weakness even then. The interesting parts of a panorama tend to be located near to the horizontal level. With your configuration, you get the worst quality from the edges of the images and a whole bunch of joins precisely in that critical area in a band around the centre. Many people prefer to take a row at pitch 0 to assure the best quality where it&#039;s needed most, and add a row above and below that, even though that adds significantly to the total number of images required.

Yes I could see that coming‚Ä¶ so I actually tried to take a series of shots earlier today. And I made a series of 8 photos at 0 degrees, and two more at +60 and -60, a total of 24 photos. The project assistant in PTGui could not figure this out, it was able to stitch the series at 0 degrees fairly acceptable together, but the other shoots were misplaced, did a fight for about an hour trying to stitch the 24 photos to a useful panorama, not much luck though. So I reckon that doing full 360x180 panoramas without a fisheye lens are going to be very time-consuming‚Ä¶.

Peter, With a big project it helps the optimizer if you initially assign all the images to their known locations. You know their yaw, pitch and roll settings and can enter these on the Image Parameters tab in advanced mode. This is quickly done by selecting groups of parameter boxes and entering a new value. There&#039;s a Fill Yaw button at the bottom to automatically calculate and enter incrementing values in a selected group of yaw boxes. When you have successfully stitched a set of images, you can use the project file as a template via the File-&gt;Apply Template option in a new project after adding in a new set of images. This copies over all the lens and image parameters. All that needs then to be done is generate control points and optimize. If there are control points for all the overlaps, there should be no optimizing problems.

So I reckon that doing full 360x180 panoramas without a fisheye lens are going to be very time-consuming‚Ä¶.

A lot of people do pano&#039;s with longer focal length lenses, I use my standard canon 18-55 zoom at the 18mm end and I amble along quite happily(ok, I dont look for great). Most of the time PTGui places my, 32 images per sphere, images where they are supposed to be, sometimes a wee nudge is required here and there and sometimes I miss shots out completely and ruin the lot all by myself. Regardless of what lens is used, the key is in the first step of taking the photos. Make sure you have enough overlap (I think, Autopano requires more overlap than PTGui can live with) and it may be an idea to do some trial shots inside a building with lots of features all around (I find churches good for this, but any building would do). And post results, you would be surprised just how helpful folks are.

Notwithstanding the high quality that is possible with using longer focal lenses, I would suggest that a fisheye is definitely the way to go. Many of us routinely take bracketed shots (RAW) to deal with high dynamic range subjects (or simply for insurance against getting the exposure less than optimum). Then 32 images become 96. This is fine if you really need high definition panoramas for printing, say. But for QTVR work displayed on the net, manageable download times generally mean panorama file sizes of 2-3MB. This is achievable with far fewer images. Maybe a Tokina 10-17mm fisheye would be a good choice. You then have the option of very good quality from 6+N+Z shots, with the option of even higher quality by using the longer focal length settings (with more images, of course).

Today I took a series of photos for a test-panorama from the balcony at my flat. Canon EOS 30D with my EF-S 10-22 mm. @ 10 mm. One series of 8 photos a 0 degrees, one at +45 degrees and one at -45 degrees, one -90 and one +90, a total of 24 pictures. The PTGui did a fairly great job this time, only a small problem with the window frame above the balcony, tried to fit some reference points, with no luck. So, some help and advice would be greatly appreciated, all the photos and panorama files are located at:http://www.guttormsen.dk/pano/20080816.zip thanks in advance (56 Mb).

Peter, I had a go at stitching your images and while I eventually got a quite reasonable stitch, the optimization is not very good and should be improved with a bit more work. There are problems assigning control points in some images because of a lack of clear features. There are no points on some images, and I just relied on the assumed yaw pitch and roll values. I used an alpha channel to eliminate a large yellow vehicle that moved between shots. I have put a zipped .mov and .pts file at www.johnhpanos.com/touareg.zip.

Thanks a lot, this is greatly appreciated, I‚Äôm happy you took the time to look in to this. I just bought a license to PTGui a will have a look at you project file ‚Äì thanks again. The quicktime panorama you have put together looks rather good‚Ä¶. I can see with some practice this will eventually go down a better road ‚Äì thanks for your time.